Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Slamming Eli in the Chalk
This morning I walked out of the South 2nd floor entrance of the business building and noticed a bunch of chalking next to the door.
The chalking was an attack against Eli for failing to deliver on his promise for a 24 hour campus. Amongst the chalking was a phrase, "Where am I supposed to study at 2 a.m.?" Perhaps in your room? Perhaps study earlier if you need to do so as a group? Clustering the attack phrases are colorful '24's, which makes me wonder whether Fox might not be the sponsor of these chalkings.
Whoever is responsible for the chalkings has very little acumen for attack advertising. See here:
1) They attacked on an issue nobody cares about. Okay, maybe there are five or six students disappointed there is no place to have group study at 3:00 a.m. Most of us don't care because we are sensibly asleep at that hour. Nobody is going to look at that broken promise and feel even a tinge of outrage.
If you are going to have an issue-oriented attack ad, it has to be something the voters are going to empathize with.
2) The ads mention Eli by name. Is there a better word than 'dumb' to describe a strategy that involves committing your own resources to publicize the name of your opponent? My thesaurus has a few suggestions, but I'll stick with 'dumb'. Get this straight: this election is a popularity contest. Most of the people voting probably couldn't name a single plank from either candidate's platform. What they will remember (subconsciously) is seeing Eli's name in pretty colors on the ground.
3) Effective negative advertising should name YOUR candidate and invite the viewer to make negative connections in his own mind. For example, the ads should have said: "Cabrera is the candidate who follows through on his promises" -- or something similar. That is a negative ad, but it puts your candidate's name out front in a positive way.
Full disclosure: Before the campaigns really started, I advised Michael on a few strategies to really get his name known. I took an informal poll and found that Eli had 4:1 name recognition advantage over Michael and tried to emphasize that his biggest task was getting people to simply know he existed.
Michael is the nice guy candidate of this race. Challengers facing incumbents must use the record of their opponents against them, but Michael was afraid of creating the appearance of a negative campaign. I'm afraid the conventional wisdom about the finishing spot of nice guys is too correct in this case.
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Phrases like "Prom Queen" being thrown around a Speaker of the Senate selection meeting come to mind when I read the last two paragraphs of this article. Some of us may remember how well the negative route and attacking your opponent worked for THAT guy.
ReplyDeleteI think I know what you're saying, Mr. Anonymous. It's better to let a secret society of closeted homosexuals do the smear work than to get your hands dirty yourself. Now *THAT* seems to be the secret to getting elected--twice, even. I tip my hat in your direction, WWJCD.
ReplyDeleteWWJCD, or preemie.com?
ReplyDelete